End of the "Cloud? Russian internet changes

Recommended Posts

Russia’s Communications Ministry has developed a program that would allow the isolation of all internal internet traffic on servers located within the country, thus minimizing the risk of foreign hackers meddling with sensitive data.

The new scheme is outlined in the ‘Digital Economy’ doctrine, which has already been forwarded to the government for discussion, Izvestia daily reports. If and when the program is implemented, the share of traffic between Russian and foreign servers would drop from the current 60 percent to just 5 percent.

State communications agency Rostelecom noted in comments that the share of cross-border data traffic could technically be brought further down, but the authors of the project had decided to maintain a reasonable reserve channel for possible emergencies.

Additionally, some Russian territories, such as the exclave of Kaliningrad, do not have direct contact with Russian mainland and simply must establish connection via foreign territory.

Rostelecom also said it did not expect any resistance to the proposal from Russian data providers, as implementing it is relatively easy and cheap.

I guess that ths is what China has already and Turkey is implementing by stealth.

From a security point of view it makes sense - all of these redirects from phishing emails to foreign-based hacking operations coudl be turned off as soon as they are identified.

It does also bring a big element of optional state control in. As we saw with HPC once the liberal establishment (in this case Google controlling HPC via its ad revenue) disagrees with something they shut it down. I doubt the British government likes its people reading Russia Today, for example, when they should be reading the authorised BBC news. They don't like it enough to ban it but there are other sites they might ban.